When the Bough Breaks: A charming World War Two saga

By Connie Monk

War is coming, but can she weather the storm?

It is the summer of 1939, and Kathie and Dennis Hawthorne are utterly content. They run a thriving market garden called Westways, and their lives are just as they always imagined. But when war arrives, Dennis, a member of the TA, is called up immediately, leaving Kathie to engage helpers and run the garden.

As Kathie's narrow existence widens, her confidence grows, but with Dennis far away and his safety under threat, her world begins to fall apart. She is stirred by previously unknown emotions that bring her to despair. She must lean on her new friendships and the community that has blossomed around the garden to find the strength to overcome her own struggles, and to ensure Westways blooms.

A charming and uplifting wartime saga for fans of Rosie Clarke and Kate Thompson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo Severn House
• Release date: Apr 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781804360545

Connie Monk

Connie Monk published over 30 novels, including Beyond the Shore and When the Bough Breaks.

Book preview

1919-1933

One

Dennis Hawthorne wasn’t a man to let his spirits be cast down easily, but as he closed the door of that dingy office and came into the bright sunshine his future held no ray of hope. This wasn’t the dream that had kept him going through those hellish years of the war. Yet he ought to be thankful – he was thankful. Thousands of men who had lost their lives in the stinking trenches would jump at the offer he’d just turned down. But he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, waste the glories of the life that had been spared to him in that miserable, gloomy shed that called itself an office. Look across the harbour to the open sea, listen to the cries of the gulls as they circled an incoming fishing boat… Then without warning the scene before him seemed to be wiped out by the vision that haunted him and, even now, more than a year since it had happened, all too often dragged him out of sleep to find himself trembling, sweating, sometimes crying like a child. There by the harbour, the May morning was overtaken by the scene of his nightmare. He was shivering despite the palms of his hands being clammy; he felt the sweat break on his brow. He was climbing out of the trench, charging into no-man’s-land, then the sound of the explosion seemed to be bursting in his head and he saw Ted Turner blown to pieces only yards from him. Ted Turner who had been his friend since they started infant school on the same day. Now instinctively he raised his shaking hand and wiped his forehead, making a supreme effort to appear normal, standing there amongst the dock workers.

‘You all right, son?’ a kindly voice asked.

‘Yes, I’m fine. Just so bright coming out from that dark shed.’

‘Ah, give me the fresh air, no matter what the weather chucks at you. Been in there to see the old man about the job, have you?’

Dennis looked at the stranger with the kindly voice, a man more than twice his age. ‘You work for him?’ he asked.

‘Ah, I work here on the dock, loading. I saw the notice in the paper for a bookkeeper. Did you get taken on?’

‘I turned it down. I did right, I know I did. But God knows how long before I find anything. Couldn’t do it though, couldn’t be stuck in that dark hovel.’

‘You home from the army I s’pose. A land fit for heroes, that’s what you boys were promised. Tell you one thing, though, lad. Nothing in this world is ever what you dream it will be; but there’s usually something good to be found if we look for it – a mate to work alongside, someone to have a joke with. You’ll find the right thing, mayhap it’s just around the next corner, eh?’

Dennis’s bad moment had passed and with the stranger’s optimistic comment echoing in his mind, he started up Quay Hill to catch the bus back to Exeter where he rented a bedsitting room. Yes, he’d done right to refuse. He was still free and like that chap had said, something good might be just around the next corner. Reality caught up with him when he joined the end of the queue waiting at the bus stop, for nearby was a man no more than his own twenty-one years, a man propped up on crutches with one empty trouser leg pinned up, and attached to a cord around his neck was a tray with boxes of matches. Dennis dug in his pocket for a penny and bought a box just as the Exeter bus drew up.

Two women laden with shopping baskets got on first, then with a smile and, ‘Good luck, mate’, to the match seller, he followed.

The bus was taking a long country route back to Exeter. It was only about midday and the thought of his bed-sitting room held no appeal. What was there to hurry for? When a couple of women got up to disembark in a village, he followed them, his nose immediately being assailed by the smell of fish and chips. So it was that with his lunch wrapped in a greasy newspaper package he turned from the village street in what he was to come to know as Sedgewood and started to walk down a narrow lane, which was signed: To the Common.

About a quarter of a mile on he came face to face with his future. No longer was it shrouded in impenetrable mist. On a garden gate was a faded sign: COTTAGE AND ABOUT FIVE ACRES TO LET The cottage stood empty, looking unloved and desolate with its painted name, Westways, so faded it was barely readable. But it wasn’t the cottage that set his imagination racing, it was the land; five acres as sadly neglected as the building itself. It was like stumbling upon something held in a time warp. This was his future: Dennis had never felt as certain of anything. Pushing open the gate that hung on one hinge he walked up the weed-choked path and pressed his nose to the windows of the house. He battled his way through the overgrown land, imagining the hours he would spend restoring it. Hours? Weeks, months, he corrected himself. He remembered how he used to love to work with his grandfather on his vegetable plot and, casting a glance to the pale winter sky, wanted to believe that his decision was gaining approval.

There was no time to lose. He jotted down the name of the agent and caught the next bus back to Deremouth. By the end of the day his future had a shape: he would breathe new life into these five acres of south Devon countryside and make the house a home. Long ago someone else must have lived there, tilling the land, caring for the property, and that’s how it would be again.

That was in May. He became the tenant on the first of June, and before that he had to attend an auction sale in Exeter and bid for the bare essentials of furniture. He took note of every penny he spent, for he had little enough to live on and he knew it would be some time before the land could bring him any income. But there were things he had to have: gardening tools (all bought second-hand) and his one extravagance, a motorized digger. But he had plenty of clearing to do before he could hope to use that.

That summer he worked outside seven days a week from first light until dusk. His scheme was to clear and plant out one patch at a time. That way by the time the winter crops came along he ought to be making some sort of a living. He found time to go to the village, to make friends with the shopkeepers and get the greengrocer’s word that he would be prepared to take his crop assuming that it was of high enough quality.

During the winter evenings he distempered the inside walls. A stranger seeing it would have thought his home a barren and cheerless place, but to Dennis it was an object of pride. The rooms were small, a kitchen-cum-sitting room, a ‘parlour’ or dining room, then upstairs two bedrooms. Outside on the back wall of the cottage he kept a zinc bath, which he had to bring indoors and fill with water heated in buckets on the range. A few yards from the cottage was an earth closet. After his years in the trenches, to Dennis it all seemed like luxury and, in the beginning, even the solitude was balm to his spirit. Surely if anything could dispel the memories that tormented him it must be the work he did on the land.

For the first two years he worked alone; paying a helper’s wage was out of the question. Bit by bit the ground was cleared, the earth turned with his motor digger and then planted. So often he sent up a silent thank you to his grandfather who had died during the war years and had left to Dennis what little money he had. Living frugally he survived, learnt to look after himself and gradually to eke out a living from his land.

---

It was in the summer of 1922 that something happened to change his future. Each day he delivered his boxes of vegetable to Jack Hopkins, the village greengrocer, in a handcart. With the delivery made he was just pushing his cart back along the track towards Westways when he saw a girl trying to put the chain back on her bicycle. Sometimes people from the village walked this way, taking the track that led to the common. But he’d never seen this girl before. She probably wasn’t local, he decided, for from her attire he imagined she had been on a long cycle ride. Wearing grey flannel pleated shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt she might have been no more than a schoolgirl – or that was his impression until he came nearer. ‘Do you need a hand?’ he called as he approached her.

‘I don’t know what’s the matter with it today. Three times the chain has come off. It’s never done it before. I think I’ve got it on and half a mile along the road it’s slipped again.’

‘Perhaps something needs tightening. Have you a tool bag?’

‘No – just two hands. And oily ones at that,’ she answered cheerfully.

She had turned the bike upside down and had been crouching by its side to fix it. Now she stood up and he saw immediately that he’d been wrong in thinking her a schoolgirl. She was a young woman, and an attractive young woman too. At a quick glance he took her in from head to toe. His first thought was that her hair reminded him of autumn and conkers; to say it was brown made it sound ordinary but it wasn’t really auburn. She was very slim, yet he was aware of her breasts under the thin cotton of her open neck blouse. Her long slender legs were bare and on her feet she wore a pair of strapped sandals little different from those of a child. Yet she certainly wasn’t a child; if she were, her long hair would have been in a pigtail instead of being swept up and pinned to the top of her head. And her face? If he thought of the picture stars of the day who were considered beautiful, then she was no beauty for there was nothing ‘rosebud’ about her mouth. Her cheekbones were pronounced and her nose tip-tilted. Yet her wide dark eyes were like no eyes he had ever seen.

Aware that she’d seen how he was staring at her he felt raw and gauche. ‘If you like, I’ll take a look at it for you.’ Once more he was in control. ‘I live just along there in that cottage.’ Then, unable to keep the pride out of his voice, he added, ‘This field here, well, I say field but it’s a market garden really, it’s mine. I’ve just been out delivering the veg to the shop in the village.’

‘You grow all that?’ She spoke in awed admiration just as he’d hoped she would. ‘Do you reckon you can fix it so that I can get back to Exeter? I’d be awfully grateful.’

He liked her more and more. Some girls would have looked on him with suspicion because he suggested she should go home with him. But not this one. She had bags of common sense; he knew it immediately. As she bent to up-end her bike, he picked it up and laid it on his cart.

‘I’ve been cycling all day,’ she told him as they started along the lane, speaking as if she’d known him for years. ‘It was really exciting, all of it new to me. I’ve only been in Exeter for a fortnight and my day off last week was wet.’

‘You’ve taken a job in Exeter? What do you do?’

‘A sort of general bit of this and bit of that. When I left school I was needed at home so I’ve never trained for anything. All I really know is looking after a house and cooking – that sort of thing. I work for an elderly couple, brother and sister. Dear old things they are. They have a housekeeper, so you could call me a housemaid except that I do other things. Sometimes I read to the old dears. Neither of them can see well enough to read for themselves and they like to keep abreast with the daily news. I like doing that, because that way I get to read the paper too. I do the mending and the ironing, I go out shopping. Yesterday I made twelve pots of jam. Like I say, I just do whatever comes along. Not being trained for anything, really, I was lucky to get taken on.’

‘I reckon they’re the lucky ones having you there to look after them. So where have you been today?’

‘I didn’t have a map so it’s hard to say. One place I went to was called Otterton St Giles – that was about the furthest I suppose. That’s where I ate my sandwiches. Then to a bigger place, Deremouth, this side of the estuary. When it was time to start for home I followed a sign that said Exeter but got sidetracked at the end of the lane here when I read this was the way ‘To the Common’. I shouldn’t have attempted it, not with all these ruts in the track. I expect that’s what got my chain off again. It was fine all the way from that Deremouth place.’

‘We’ll soon get it fixed. Here we are, in you go.’ He held the gate open for her then followed her with the cart. ‘Do you want to wait in the house while I see what I can do? My toolbox is in the shed over there.’

‘I’d rather come and watch you, just in case I have trouble another time – unless your wife or your mother or someone is in there and will think it rude of me.’

‘I have neither wife nor mother. I live on my own.’ Then with a ring of pride, he added, ‘And I work on my own too, can’t afford any help yet. But it’s all coming along really well. When I’ve done the bike I’ll show you what I grow if you like.’ She nodded, her wide mouth beaming with pleasure. ‘I’d like that.’

It was more than an hour later that he walked with her to the end of the lane and saw her on her way. He’d wanted to ask her to come to Sedgewood again next time she had a day off and it didn’t rain, but he was frightened to suggest it in case she refused. So all he said was, ‘I work here on my own all the time. If you’re ever this way drop in and say hello.’

‘May I? I don’t want to be a nuisance when you’ve got masses to do. Or perhaps you could give me some jobs. Remember I’m good at doing a bit of this and a bit of that.’

‘Come soon, won’t you.’ The words were out before he could stop them.

‘Just try and stop me! By the way, what’s your name? I’m Kathie Barnes.’

‘And I’m Dennis Hawthorne. Just Den does me.’

‘Bye then, Den. If it’s not chucking it down on us next week I’ll ride over. But you must promise you’ll tell me if you’re too busy. I won’t mind, honestly.’

He promised. But secretly they both knew that the days between then and her next free time were simply hours to be lived through.

Until the day he had chanced on Kathie, his own company had been all he’d wanted. His three years at Westways had calmed his shattered nerves, even dimmed some of the memories that would never be erased; solitude had become a habit and he was never lonely. Then meeting Kathie changed everything.

The following week he took her into the cottage, giving her the Grand Tour of the sparsely furnished rooms with their distempered walls. He even pointed out the zinc bath and the outside closet, not as features to be despised but as an accepted part of the ambience. And viewing it all, her eyes shone with admiration; there he was, a young, strong, good-looking man, thoroughly self-reliant.

As the weeks went by, each time she had her day off she cycled from the house near Exeter to Sedgewood. It would have taken more than rain to deter her, in fact she liked wet days when instead of working on the land they were in the cottage. She cooked their lunch – making sure she did enough that he had something he could warm up for supper or for the next day. For both of them, her visits were the highlight of their week. He knew so little about girls. Being with her made him aware of what a loner he had become. Most of his army compatriots had gone home to wives or girlfriends, but he’d had neither. If he’d had a sedentary job (like the one in that dingy shed by the harbour) he would have looked for female company in the evenings. Most nights when he went to bed he was too tired to miss the thing that was lacking in his life. Yet he was a normal, healthy young man and often enough his sleep would be disturbed by something he couldn’t control. Knowing nothing of the realities of shared love making, even his fantasies lacked direction. All that changed when Kathie came into his life. He would find himself watching her as she reached to pick the first of the runner beans, aware that on these warm summer days she wore nothing under her cotton blouse and imagining how her small breasts would feel if only he could hold them in the palms of his hands. Then his hand might move down her flat stomach, force its way between her slender thighs, he would…

‘What’s up?’ she said, turning unexpectedly from her task. Then, suddenly uncertain, ‘Are you all right, Den? You look sort of funny.’

‘Kathie, I was thinking.’

‘Oh dear! Do you always look funny when you think?’ she teased.

‘Kathie, I’ve never felt like this before. Is this what being in love does to you?’

‘In love?’ It was barely a whisper.

The runner beans were forgotten as he came close to her and held her hands tightly in his. ‘Can’t think of anything but you. I want you as part of my life – all of my life – working together, living together. Kathie, what is it? Don’t cry, Kathie.’

‘Can’t help it. So happy.’ As the tears spilled from her brimming eyes, she forced her contorted face into a smile. ‘Hold me tight, Den.’

Clinging to each other they knew complete happiness. With all the innocence of youth they saw their fixtures as cloudless; if they had each other nothing could touch them.

‘You’re only eighteen. Who has to give permission for you to marry?’

‘My mother.’ It came as a surprise to him that she had a relative as close as a mother. She never spoke of her family. ‘She lives in Hampshire. My father died when I was just a kid but Mum and I were fine, he left enough money for us to live on. I don’t mean we were rich, but she never had to worry and the house was our own. I was still at school when she met Cyril Harper, a photographer. She fell for him. She behaved as if she were less than half her age. Anyway, it was stupid; we were quite all right as we were. But they got married and he came to live in our house. He decided I was old enough to leave school and help at home. I was no more than a glorified maid in the house – not even a glorified one if I’m truthful. Mother got pregnant as soon as they were married and the next thing I was expected to be nursemaid too. Algy was a good little chap I suppose, but I resented always having to look after him, wash his nappies, everything. But Mother was intent on giving beastly Cyril everything he wanted. Before Algy was a year old she had her next, a girl they called Lily. That was back in January. I made up my mind I was going to get a job. Then with Lily only a few weeks old, Mother and her wretched man were pleased as punch because she recognized the signs; hardly up and about from Lily, she was pregnant again. They seem to want to breed like rabbits and they’re not even young. Mother is forty and he’s even more. It’s disgusting.’ She almost spat the word out.

Dennis looked at her tenderly, thinking not so much about her mother’s second chance at happiness as about the hurt he knew Kathie felt.

‘But they’re happy together?’

‘If being happy means that she gazes at him like some moonstruck youngster and talks a lot of drivel about getting pregnant so easily being proof that they are made for each other. It was as if she couldn’t think of anything else. It was as if he’d cast a sort of spell on her. I didn’t want to hear about it. They’re old, for goodness sake! It’s revolting. Anyway I saw this job in the newspaper and wrote about it, then the next thing I knew I had a letter saying they wanted me to work for them. They’re a nice old couple – Mr and Miss Blackwell. They pay me ten shillings a week and my keep – it was going to be seven and sixpence but on my first pay day Mr Blackwell said they had had a little chat and decided to give me ten shillings.’ She had talked fast, speaking her thoughts aloud. ‘Heavens! Hark at me! Once I get started there’s no stopping me.’

‘I love you Kathie Barnes. I want to know everything – about your past, about your thoughts…’

‘And my future?’

‘And your future… every day of our lives, darling Kathie. And if what your mother says is true we shall have an army of children to help us on the land.’

She chuckled, nuzzling her head against his neck.

‘I’ll write to Mother this evening and tell her about us. I’ll say we want to be married and ask for her consent. She’ll give it right enough. She’s so besotted with that pompous prick of a man that she’s probably forgotten I exist at all.’

Dennis laughed at the sudden change in her tone.

‘We’ll be so happy that no one will have the power to trouble us. I ought to have proposed to you in the time honoured way, on one knee vowing my endless love—’

‘And all that jazz,’ she sang. Then meeting his gaze her expression suddenly changed again. Excitement gave way to an emotion that seemed to take her breath away. ‘Den, hold me close.’ She had never been kissed like this; her heart was pounding and following her natural impulse her lips parted and she moved her tongue on his mouth. For Dennis, too, this was a new experience. Often enough when he’d woken in the silence of the night he had imagined her as he followed where nature led. But that was as nothing compared with the reality of holding her.

‘Your hand,’ she whispered with her mouth touching his. And the next thing he knew she guided him to press it against her small, pert breast, her own hand covering his and moving his fingers backwards and forwards across the pinnacle of her nipple.

‘No, Kathie,’ he spoke more to himself than to her. ‘Kathie, I want to touch you, every bit of you. Oh God, but I want you.’

She felt him pull his hand from her breast and moved her own with it, so that as he lowered his she still held it and together they raised her skirt then guided him to the wide leg of her knickers. Never before had he hated the narrow life he’d led as he hated it now. On leave in France he had been with some of his compatriots to what were thought of as ‘naughty’ shows, but never had he seen a naked woman and never had his hand explored as it did as Kathie stood close against him with one leg wrapped around him. As his finger probed he drew back his head and looked at Kathie; her eyes were closed, her lips parted and as she breathed she made a soft whimpering sound. She was as inexperienced and naive as he was, but she wasn’t ignorant. With her eyes still closed she moved the hand that had lead him to his goal and eased it into the waist of his trousers. He gave a shuddering sigh as he felt it close around him.

‘Kathie, no, Kathie, no.’ Then, unable to stop himself, he continued, ‘Yes, go on, harder, harder, oh God, coming… can’t stop it.’ With a convulsive movement he leant heavily on her as she felt the warm fluid on her hand, bringing her closer to filling the gaps in her knowledge and understanding. ‘So sorry… tried not to…’

‘I’m glad it happened. Den, I love you so much.’ They had moved apart, her skirt fallen back into place and her hand retrieved. But the moment still held them; they weren’t ready to let it go. He passed her his handkerchief to wipe her hand; they didn’t look directly at each other. For both of them the last minutes had been a journey